great links everyone. i've included puppy(currently firehydrant) in my free linux cd's stack at the local coffee shop for a year now, but have never had reason to use it extensivly. (fast fancy lappy with annoying braodcom wi-fi)

low-and behold An olpc on craigslist! and now at home with me.
the consensus on sugar is right, they are trying to reinvent the wheel, which is dumb. the olpc bigwigs should have looked for the lightest weight most functional distro.. hmmm??? and started from there....
not mfing fedora,, grown...

anyways as far as i can tell, olpc boots from usb, and all i have to do is use the olpcs kernal and intamfs... was going to insert them into my puppy usb.. but im stopping myself. life is busy, and if barry hasn't gotten it quickly, then im sure as heck not going to either..

Here's another link (about ubuntu on the XO) that may be helpful for getting Puppy running on the XO. One of the guys who got it working posted what looks like a good amount of info about what he had to do.

I hope Puppy on the XO hasn't been given up on. It seems a perfect fit; I'd much rather be using it than Sugar+Fedora.

an even easier way to install your favorite distribution, say from the one you use on your desktop, is to just copy everything from that machine's partition(s) that contain the distribution to the target flash or USB disk (assuming it will fit). After you copy the distribution, just copy the /boot, /etc/modprobe.d, /lib/modules, /security directories from the OLPC, modify /etc/fstab, /etc/X11/xorg.conf and /boot/olpc.fth as needed and reboot from the OLPC. Of course, you still have configuration tailoring to do for the OLPC, but this gets you started with something your already use to.

from http://www.olpcnews.com/forum/index.php?topic=2267.msg17879;topicseen

I'm new to puppy linux, but my first experiences with it on a CD and flash drive have been wonderful. Next year I'm going traveling, and I've been thinking that an OLPC with handmade solar charger/hand crank would be nothing short of amazing. Thus, I'm currently working on getting an OLPC XO. Negotiations are underway as I type.

That said, sugar is definitely not my interface of choice. Xubuntu looks okay, but Puppy on the OLPC would be amazing.

foucualt posted the method above, which I plan to try once I have said OLPC, and though he hasn't tried it I was wondering if anyone else had. I'm certainly not the most proficient of computer users, and probably somewhere near the bottom of linux users, but I can follow directions and have a decent amount of time to spend.

Posted: Wed 25 Jun 2008, 11:33 Post_subject:
OLPC booting WinXP from SD Card with new Bios changesSub_title: Maybe Puppy can be one of the other operating systems.

If we can update our OLPC machines to the new OFW Version 2, maybe there is still a glimmer of hope regarding booting and running Puppy exclusively from an SD card or USB stick. If anyone finds any information regarding how to update the OLPC Bios firmware, please post. Not sure if we have a change in hell of getting the OLPC onboard wireless to work? Maybe if the kernels are close enough it could work by simply copying the wireless driver onto the Puppy flash boot device.

Regards
Ron

"Open Firmware V2, the free and open source BIOS, is now capable of running Linux, Microsoft Windows XP and other operating systems, and was developed by Firmworks with support from OLPC. This will enable dual boot of OLPC XO laptops with Microsoft Windows XP in addition to the existing Fedora-based system and will become the standard BIOS/bootloader for all XO systems when completed."